K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

One Web-based remote desktop option

I spent an hour or so this morning looking into Web-based Java desktop sharing services, and had the best luck with one called Elluminate. I believe the original purpose is educational, for online classes and so forth. It allows remote desktop control under certain circumstances, which is what I was originally after, and doesn’t require port forwarding or other technical points.

It also has some file sharing, whiteboard displays, audio and multimedia options. In that sense it’s a bit overkill for what I need, but one never knows when those frills might come in handy.

It’s also free for up to three connections at a time, which means I could conceivably host more than one person in a “session.” Why would I want to do that? Beats me. But it sounds cool.😀

One thing that I need to remember for the future, is that my fastest machine is still a great deal slower than the machine I was connecting to. I was getting some serious lag while waiting for the desktop to refresh, and didn’t figure out why until I realized that the distant machine had a lot of desktop effects enabled.

So the moral of the story is, turn off Compiz when connecting a Pentium III to a dual core machine.😯

Interesting. I hadn’t heard any assessments either way; that one seemed to be the one that worked best for me with the least setup. Audio, in my case, isn’t critical so I hadn’t worried myself over it.

For your purposes, it’s probably not a problem. Elluminate is certainly miles better than another product I’ve used (can’t remember the name right now). It’s just problematic when trying to learn or teach.

I found elluminate pretty good. We use it at IBM for training sessions across continents. It works pretty well. I liked the facility for raising a hand, saying yes/no. In the hands of a good trainer, this tool can give as close an experience as classroom teaching as possible.